


like a dream you didn't have

by glaucusAtlanticus



Category: Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi | Spirited Away
Genre: Gen, Growing Up, Memories, beautiful and broken things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:45:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1695359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glaucusAtlanticus/pseuds/glaucusAtlanticus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something fragile about the beauty of the shrines, a feeling of wonder that trembles and shakes when the cars roar past too loudly or when the light is wrong. Like the stars at the edge of evening, glowing and fading, bright from the corner of the eye but invisible if you look too directly. Don’t look back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	like a dream you didn't have

There is no turnoff from the road that zigzags up to the blue house on the end of the street. By the fourth or fifth time she goes looking for it Chihiro isn’t sure why she ever thought there was one.  
  
She is fascinated by the little stone houses that cluster under the trees, pieces of something old and wonderful and strange just a stone’s throw from the road. Sometimes on her way to school she leaves things on their mossy doorsteps – flower petals or seeds or little star-shaped candies. Never coins, never anything big enough that she’d notice if it were gone the next day, or notice it still there. There is something fragile about the beauty of the shrines, a feeling of wonder that trembles and shakes when the cars roar past too loudly or when the light is wrong. Like the stars at the edge of evening, glowing and fading, bright from the corner of the eye but invisible if you look too directly. Don’t look back.  
  
October, it rains and rains. She sits cross-legged by the window eating rice on a quiet Sunday. She watches the road turn slick and overflow, but the trees on the hill below drink up the rain with endless thirst. She imagines the water pouring between the leaves, flowing down the dark trunks, carving streams here and there down the path of the hill. She imagines the pond forming in the crease of the valley floor, becoming a lake, becoming a sea. The clear fresh water rising, the tossing branches of the trees becoming strange corals, the birds darting like schools of fish. Far away through the curtains of rain the headlamps of a car slide along the road. She squints and can almost imagine the light as the lanterns of a boat, weaving through the waves of leaves and rain, headed for some distant shore. She doesn’t wonder where it’s going. Anywhere would be an adventure, anywhere but here. In the next room her mother thinks Chihiro doesn’t hear her remark that it must be the weather, making the girl sigh so.  
  
Her father comes in to tuck her into bed, a gesture he makes with well-meaning but careless irregularity. She is hunched up against the pillows at the top of the bed, reading. “Fairy tales?” he asks, a note of amusement in his tone. “Aren’t you a little old for that?” Chihiro hums vaguely in answer, sliding a bookmark along a page showing a glossy ink painting of a dragon. Her father clicks the light off as he leaves. She waits until his footsteps sound across the hall and down the stairs before she reaches into the space between the bed and the wall to retrieve her flashlight. She opens the book again, the flashlight lending yellowy highlights to the dragon’s scales. The words spin along the edges of memory and dream, sparking sensations –emotions – flavors and smells, and she’s too tired to know which of them were ever real. She falls asleep against the page and dreams of long train rides through shifting darkness, through fields of grass and marshes and open oceans tossed with shimmering wind.  
  
She forgets and doesn’t forget. She keeps the goodbye card on the windowsill long after the flowers have died, even after the face of the girl who gave it to her blurs and fades. Sometimes she looks at it and knows, unquestioningly, how important it had been to have her name written in pink pen on a scrap of card. She remembers the scent of flowers, and the best onigiri she’d ever eaten. Other times the card is just a reminder of the pieces of life that fall out of place, the face and the voice she can’t quite recall, hazy memories of playground adventures to other worlds. She remembers that the girl used to be her best friend, and there’s still a certain warmth when she thinks of her, only she can’t remember these days if her eyes were brown or green, if her hair was long and caramel blond or short and silky black.  
  
The pieces of the world that fall out of place. That’s a good way of putting it, she tells the mossy shrines one morning. Her knees are soaking up cold from the damp ground, and her umbrella keeps rolling along her shoulder to an angle that lets drops spatter against her face. The water doesn’t bother her. She is wearing her hair loose today, so the purple band is looped around her left wrist. She knows, she has always known, that it was a gift – it has the feel of a gift, the warmth of the hand of the giver still in it. But she can’t think who gave it to her. No face or memory will stick to it. It fits only into the messy gap between the old house and the new one, the day in the back of the car with the rattling pile of boxes and the wilting flowers. She remembers and she doesn’t remember. A room like a train station, a grassy hill covered in strange statues, a red clock tower. And stranger but no less sure she remembers a train, an ornate bath, a room full of steam and soot and herbs. A river in the dark, lights on the water. She sighs and places her gift on the stones – tiny dried roses from her mother’s tea cabinet. She spins the pink umbrella as she sets of for school. Behind her, the flowers melt in the rain.


End file.
